Lawrence Durrell: Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

The old road turns inwards upon itself and slopes away towards Lentini and Carlentini whence a brutally dusty and bumpy road leads us onwards into the hills to draw rein at our first Greek site — a resurrected city not unlike Cameirus in Rhodes, but nowhere near as beautiful; yet a little redeemed by the site and the old necropolis. What landscape tasters the ancient Greeks were! They chose sites like a soldier chooses cover. The basic elements were always the same, southern exposure, cover from the prevailing wind, height for coolness and to defeat the humidity of the littoral. They had none of our (albeit very recent) passion for sea bathing; the sea was a mysterious something else pitched between a goddess of luck and a highway. It is not hard to imagine how they were — with their combination of poetry and practicality. There was no barrier, it seems, between the notions of the sacred and the profane either.

After a short briefing we were turned loose among the ruins like a flock of sheep — hardly more intelligent either, you might have thought, to watch us mooching about. The Microscopes had begun to feel hungry, and the pile of box lunches and flasks of Chianti were being unloaded and placed in the shade of a tree against the moment when culture had been paid its due. In the bright sunlight the blonde German girl reminded me a little of Martine for she had the same thick buttercup hair and white-rose coloring which had made my friend such a striking beauty. But not the slow rather urchin smile with the two swift dimples that greeted the lightest, the briefest jest. Nor the blue eyes which in certain lights reminded one of Parma violets. But I was sure that here she had sat upon a tomb while her children played about among the ruins, smoking and pondering, or perhaps reading a page or two of the very same Goethe — as unconditional an addict of Sicily as she herself had become.

It was, however, a well-calculated shift of accent, of rhythm — I meant to spend the first day in the open air, lively with bees in the dazing heat, and where the shade of the trees rested like a damp cloth on the back of the neck. Little did it matter that the pizzas were a trifle soggy — but I am wrong: for the first faint murmurs of protest came from the French camp about precisely this factor. And the two graceful Parisians added that the paper napkins had been forgotten. Roberto swallowed this with resignation. Far away down the mildly rolling hillocks glittered the sea on rather a sad little bit of sandy littoral, and here we were promised an afternoon swim when we had digested our lunch, a prospect which invigorated me and raised the spirits of my companion. But some of us looked rather discountenanced by the thought, and Beddoes swore roundly that he wasn’t going to swim in the sea with all its sharks; he wanted a pool, a hotel pool. He had paid for a pool and he was damn well going to insist on a pool or else.… So it went on.

Deeds, on the contrary, declared that things were not so bad after all; that we were all quite decent chaps and that no great calamities or internal battles need be expected. It was true. Even the Bishop, who in my own mind might be the one to inflict deep irritations on us because of his knowledgeability and insularity and patronizing air — even he went out of his way to humor Roberto in terms which almost made him a fellow scholar. I could see that he was a pleasant and conscientious man underneath an evident Pauline-type neurosis which is almost endemic in the Church of England, and usually comes from reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in paperback. Deeds had got quite a selection of guides to the island in English and French and these we riffled while we ate. He professed himself extremely dissatisfied by them all.

“It took me some time to analyze why — it’s the sheer multiplicity of the subject matter. The damned island overflows with examples of the same type of thing — you have six cathedrals where in other places you would save up your admiration for the one or two prime examples. How can a guidebook do justice to them all? It just can’t, old man. Here you get six for the price of one, and the very excellence of what it has ends by fatiguing you.” I wondered if he was right. The illustrations, however, to his books seemed to bear him out to a certain extent. Perhaps that is why Martine had remarked more than once in her letters, “What we lack here is a ‘pocket’ Sicily; there hasn’t been one since Goethe. The present guides lack poetry, and the existing star system devised for ruins is rather unsatisfactory. Please hurry up.” But it was not a task that could be undertaken on such brief acquaintance with the place; I would never manage more than a journal of voyage with a brief snapshot of her from time to time — the absentee landlord of Naxos. Nor did I dare so much as to regret her death — I could hear the chuckle which would certainly have greeted such a sentiment. On many domains Martine might have been deficient and lacking in human experience; but on what I considered prime matters like death and love she was wise beyond experience. She would frequently disappear to India without leaving me a word; there was some Indian princeling there who was as attached to her as I was. When she returned it was always with carpets and shawls and screens to deck out her house on the promontory. But this was not all, for her Prince sent her back laden with issues of the Pali texts, annotated in a spidery hand by his father, and bearing a royal bookplate. These we would read together and discuss at great length, lying in the deep grass of the ruined Abbey of Bellapais, or among the shattered pillars of Salamis. The range and prolixity of Indian thought haunted her with its promises of a serenity at the heart of self-realization, but there was no way to advance in this direction without self-discipline. She had quite defeated tobacco and only drank very modestly, out of mere politeness, and indeed with something approaching distaste. At least she eyed my heroic potations with an expression which might be described as compassion bordering on scorn!

Her Prince encouraged these fragile aspirations which were (so she hoped) going to transform the spoiled society girl, anesthetized by too many parties, into someone very valuable to herself and to others. No, the aspirations did not go as far as sainthood. But she planned for calm, balance, and a personal freedom in her solitude. She, like me, had wanted to settle in Greece, but the vagaries of the Control Exchange had defeated these intentions. But Cyprus was a sterling-area Greece, and that decided us.… Though I had not actually met her for about six months — during which we were both taken up with buying a house, or land, and in general feeling our way towards an island residence — I had seen her about the little harbor of Kyrenia, always alone, and usually reading a book. She wore a Wren’s white mess jacket with brass buttons and a dark swimsuit which showed off to perfection not only her line but also the blonde skin which the sun turned to brown sugar. Nobody could tell me who she was — indeed I knew nobody to ask. But once or twice a week I passed her as she lay asleep on the mole, myself also with a towel and a book. Then one day we found ourselves sitting together at a lunch party and felt the tug of a familiarity which we had been too polite to profit by: we already knew each other so well by sight. She was amused and pleased when she found out that I spoke Greek and could become a friendly Caliban for her; myself, as I was passing through a particularly lonely period of my life, I was delighted by such a chance friendship. From then on we met once or twice a week for dinner — and when there was any need for an interpreter she had no hesitation in driving up to Bellapais and digging me out.

Our friendship prospered in the very notion that we were going to become neighbors; and that we were both going to live alone and work. I showed her a half-finished novel called Justine , while she, with much hesitation, entrusted me with a half-finished travel book called provisionally The Bamboo Flute . It was about her first solo flight around Indonesia and Bali and it was organized in a series of cinematic rushes which at that stage had a bright but highly provisional air. But there were good things in it about colors and smells. I remember one sharp comparison of smell between a crowded country bus in Indonesia and the London Tube; the Indonesians however primitively they were forced to live, she said, smelled of nothing, were astonishingly clean; but the London Tube smelled of wet mackintosh and concrete and damp hairdos.